The alliteration in the title of “Good Grief,” Dan Levy’s feature film debut for Netflix, extends into the storytelling. Mawkish and moving, romantic and realist, it’s a story of loss, lamentation and life that allows Levy to stretch his wings as a writer, director and performer.
Levy plays Marc, an artist who put his career on semi-hold as his superstar writer husband Oliver’s (Luke Evans) sci fi fantasy novels topped the best-seller lists. Tragedy strikes as Marc hosts a holiday party in their beautifully appointed London apartment before Oliver jets off to Paris for a book signing at the Louvre.
Minutes after Oliver leaves the warm, fuzzy celebration, sirens fill the air and Marc’s worst fears are realized. Oliver has been killed in a car accident, just a block from their flat.
Shattered by the loss, and the recent death of his mother, Marc withdraws, save for the company of his two closest friends, ex-boyfriend Thomas (Himesh Patel) and loose-cannon Sophie (Ruth Negga).
“For such a meticulous person,” Marc says of Oliver, “he left behind one hell of a mess.”
With the American publishing company demanding a return on Oliver’s unfinished book advances, a careful study of the couple’s expenses reveal the writer kept a secret pied-à-terre in Paris. Curious, Marc invites Thomas and Sophie for a weekend visit to Paris as a thank you for helping him through a very difficult year. “This is where people come to have sex,” Sophie yowls as they lay eyes on Oliver’s secret getaway.
As the City of Lights twinkles appealingly in the background, the trio confront the ragged truths of messy relationships and forge a path forward.
“Good Grief” is a study in the good, the bad and the ugly of relationships, romantic and platonic. This isn’t like a sad episode of Levy’s sitcom “Schitt’s Creek” and it’s not a ten Kleenex weepie. It’s somewhere in between. There are funny moments (see Kaitlyn Dever’s inappropriate eulogy at Oliver’s funeral for example) and humorous lines, but they are tempered by the central trio’s journey to understand the melancholic messes they have made of their lives.
It’s a mix-and-match of love and sadness with subtle shadings of romantic and road trip comedy, but it never dims the stark light it shines on the realities of friendship. Hard questions are asked and addressed, but at the end it suggests these characters don’t have their acts together, because, really, who does?
It may not be the most original thought, but this is a promising feature film directorial debut that works best when it plays it simple. A scene of the three of them on a Ferris Wheel is revealing, sweet and funny, and Marc’s scenes with Theo (Arnaud Valois), a French man he meets at an art installation, despite some clunky dialogue (“Isn’t art kind of a commemoration of pain?”) are among the film’s best.
“Good Grief” is an open-hearted, amiable film that displays Levy’s abilities as a director. It’s a handsomely mounted movie with a keen eye for casting. Luke Evans is particularly well suited to play the movie’s McGuffin, and capitalizes on his modest screentime. Patel and Negga make the most of their sidekick roles and Paris looks beautiful. Most of all, however, it’s unafraid to defy the expectations we might have had for Levy’s follow-up to the success of his award winning “Schitt’s Creek.”
Movies about giant things hurdling through space toward Earth are almost as plentiful as the stars in the sky. “Armageddon,” “Deep Impact” and “Judgment Day” all pose end-of-the-world scenarios but none have the satirical edge of “Don’t Look Up.” The darkly comedic movie, now in theatres but coming soon to Netflix, paints a grim, on-the-nose picture of how the world responds to a crisis.
Jennifer Lawrence is PhD candidate Dr. Kate Dibiasky, a student astronomer who discovers a comet the size of Mount Everest aimed directly at our planet. Her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), comes to the alarming conclusion that the comet will collide with Earth in six months and fourteen days in what he calls an “extinction level event.”
They take their concerns to NASA and the White House, but are met with President Janie Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) concerns about optics, costs and the up-coming mid-term elections. “The timing is just disastrous,” she says. “Let’s sit tight and assess.”
With the clock ticking to total destruction Dibiasky and Mindy go public, but their dire warnings on the perky news show “The Rip”—“We keep the bad news light!”—go unheeded. Social media focusses on Dibiasky’s panic, creating memes of her face, while dubbing Mindy the Bedroom Eyed Doomsday Prophet.
As the comet hurdles toward Earth the world becomes divided between those willing to Look Up and do something about the incoming disaster and the deniers who think that scientists “want you to look up because they are looking down their noses at you.”
Chaos breaks out, and the division widens as the comet closes in on its target.
It is not difficult to find parallels between the events in “Don’t Look Up” and recent world occurrences. Director and co-writer Adam McKay explores the reaction to world affairs through a lens of Fake News, clickbait journalism, skepticism of science, political spin and social media gone amok. In fact, the topics McKay hits on don’t really play like satire at all. The social media outrage, bizarro-land decisions made by people in high offices and the influence of tech companies all sound very real world, ripped out of today’s newspapers.
It’s timely, but perhaps too timely. Social satire is important, and popular—“Saturday Night Live” has done it successfully for decades—but “Don’t Look Up,” while brimming with good ideas, often feels like an overkill of familiarity. The comet is fiction, at least I hope it is, but the reaction to it and the on-coming catastrophe feels like something I might see on Twitter just before the lights go down in the theatre.
It feels a little too real to be pure satire. There are laughs throughout, but it’s the serious questions that resonate. When Mindy, on TV having his “Network” moment, rages, “What the hell happened to us? What have we done to ourselves and how do we fix it?” the movie becomes a beacon. The satire is comes easily—let’s face it, the world is full of easy targets—but it’s the asking of hard questions and in the frustration of a world gone mad, when McKay’s point that we’re broken and don’t appreciate the world around us, shines through.
Despite big glitzy Hollywood names above the title and many laugh lines, “Don’t Look Up” isn’t escapism. It’s a serious movie that aims to entertain but really wants to make you think.
Calling all emerging, aspiring at home filmmakers; this challenge is for you. Christopher Nolan’s feature films are known to be cherished, cinematic experiences, guaranteeing the next project by the visionary auteur will be an event like no other.
TENET is set to hit theatres in Canada on August 26, 2020 and if you haven’t poured over the brain-bending trailer countless times yet, here’s what you need to know: John David Washington (BlacKkKlansman) stars as The Protagonist, armed with only one word—Tenet—and, fighting for the survival of the entire world, journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. Not time travel—Inversion. Whoa. Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Clémence Poésy, Himesh Patel, Michael Caine and Kenneth Branagh also co-star for one stacked cast.
As with any Christopher Nolan film, there’s much to unpack and we want to see how you interpret the concept of time for a chance at a major prize.
Do you see time as forward, backward, looping or something else entirely? Grab your camera or phone and create a 55-second video for the Inspired by Tenet National Filmmaker Contest that shows your skills as a filmmaker. The most inventive, exciting entry, as chosen by CTV film critic Richard Crouse, will win $10,000, debut nationally on etalk and be featured in the Cineplex Pre-Show in theatres across Canada. Whether you grab your family to create a fully-produced, time travel epic, or your dog for a looping video of cuteness, all you have to do is show how you interpret time.
“We’re living in a twilight world.” That’s the password The Protagonist (John David Washington) and Company use in “Tenet,” the new Christopher Nolan mind-bender, now playing only in theatres, but the movie’s premise is more “Twilight Zone” than twilight world.
The movie opens with a breathless and loud rescue sequence in an opera house in Ukraine, the first of the movie’s several eye-and-ear-popping action sequences. At stake is a mysterious component, part of a much larger device, with the power to end the world. A nuclear holocaust? “No, something worse.”
The Protagonist is tasked with piecing together the potentially world ending puzzle. “Your duty transcends national interest,” says his handler Victor (Martin Donovan). All he has to go on is a gesture and a code word, Tenet. “It will open some of the right doors,” Victor says, “but some of the wrong ones too.”
So far, “Tenet” feels like an elaborate James Bond style story, complete with exotic locations, enigmatic characters and a world that needs saving.
Then things get complicated.
The Protagonist isn’t simply dealing with the usual spy stuff, like international intrigue, a Russian oligarch or femme fatales. He’s fighting against “inversion,” a disturbance in the very fabric of time, that sees material running backwards through time, while the rest of the world moves forward. So, in the upside-down story of “Tenet,” an “inverted” weapon could affect the past as well as the present.
It’s a reversal of the way we think of linear time. It’s not time travel. The Protagonist doesn’t jump back to ancient Egypt for a quick chat with Cleopatra or zip forward to talk to his 100-year-old self. When he inverts, he is in the moment, but running counter to everyone else. “You’re not shooting the bullet,” he’s told by a researcher (Clémence Poésy). “You’re catching it.” Then, by way of clarity, she adds, “don’t try and understand it,” which may be the best advice The Protagonist has received to this point.
Teamed with shadowy operative Neil (Robert Pattinson), The Protagonist enters a topsy-turvy world of high-end art, down-and-dirty dealings with strongman Andrei Stor (Kenneth Branagh) and a clock that is moving backwards and forwards simultaneously. “You have a future in the past,” Neil says to The Protagonist.
At the centre of the action is John David Washington, hot off his Golden Globe Best Actor nomination for “BlacKkKlansman.” He’s in every scene, and whether wearing a Brooks Brother suit (in one of the film’s funniest exchanges) or hanging off the side of a building, he’s a convincing action hero with acting chops. It’s a demanding role and he pulls it off with equal parts bravado and restraint. It takes swagger to anchor a movie like this but in his relationship with Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) he reveals a flirtier, more tender side. The protagonist is a well-rounded character and, if they don’t do a “Tenet 2: Time Gone Wild” perhaps his name could be added to the list of 007 candidates.
The supporting cast, Branagh as the “all our lives in his hands” villain and Debicki as his beleaguered wife and Pattinson as the calm, cool and collected mercenary, all acquit themselves well but “Tenet’s” real star, however, is Christopher Nolan.
For blockbuster starved audiences Nolan delivers the kind of spectacle we’re used to seeing in the summer months. As per usual, he avoids CGI wherever possible in favor of practical effects. The results are eye-popping. The big set pieces—like an airplane driving through a building—don’t have the kind of digital disconnect that often comes with computer generated action. The show-stopping sequences are busy, exciting but most of all, organic, and the sense of peril (and pageantry) that comes with that is undeniable. Add to that Nolan’s use of IMAX cameras and you have wild action that fills the big screen in every way.
With a complicated story comes drawbacks. In the first hour there is a lot of exposition. People ask questions—Do you know what a free port is? How does inversion work?—while others take the time to answer them all in an effort to keep the audience in the loop. There’s a lot of talk about theories and plans but Nolan keeps things lively with lightning fast—with a capital “F”— pacing.
Will you understand the puzzles of “Tenet’s” time manipulation story? Maybe, maybe not. It’s definitely a movie that will hold up to multiple viewings, revealing new info and fostering more understanding of the plot each time. The trippy last hour is jam packed with artfully arranged action scenes that manipulate time in increasingly psychedelic ways. While you may feel lost in time as the movie careens toward the end of its 150-minute running time with an involved and inversive climax that weaves the past into the fabric of The Protagonist’s mission, you may wish you could invert time and relive the story again. And you can, for the price of a ticket.
“Tenet” opens in over 70 countries worldwide, including Europe and Canada, starting on Wednesday, August 26.
